Throwback Thursday

It's our last post of 2015!  We want to take this time to thank you all for your support and a successful first year of the website.  Christina and I couldn't continue this endeavor without your help and we are grateful for your listening to the podcast, visits to the website, and fervent participation in ALNM's first ever ship bracket.  With your help, we've made it to a whopping 1,470 downloads as of today and were able to experience our first San Diego Comic-Con.  So thank you, everyone.  We look forward to all that the new year has in store for us!  Have a safe and happy new year and we'll see you all in 2016!

Love,
Kelly and Christina

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.....

Let’s go back to: One Tree Hill
In September of 2003, a little show about two half-brothers living in the fictional town of Tree Hill, North Carolina premiered on what was then The WB.  The dramatic lives of Lucas and Nathan Scott and their friends Brooke Davis, Haley James (later Haley James Scott), and Peyton Sawyer spanned for nine seasons on The CW and saw them through high school and adulthood.  The show, which was created by Mark Schwahn (who now is known for The Royals on E!) was originally supposed to be a made-for-TV movie called An Unkindness of Ravens, but the TV show proved to be wildly successful.  In the show, the brothers who started out as rivals soon became friends when Lucas's best friend Haley (played by Bethany Joy Lenz) fell in love with and later married Nathan Scott (James Lafferty)...while they were still in high school, no less.  That coupling went on to create one of the greatest TV couples of all time: Naley.  Lucas (played by Agent Carter's Chad Michael Murray) dated the hot cheerleader Brooke Davis (Chicago Fire's Sophia Bush) while they were in high school, but later married Peyton Sawyer (played by White Collar's Hilarie Burton) in the seventh season.  The show, while it had its ups and downs, was great.  To this day, one of the most intriguing episodes is one from its third season which involved all the characters caught in the middle of a school shooting at their high school.  The episode, entitled "With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept", still regarded as one of the best episodes dealing with gun violence in schools for young people.  One Tree Hill had a lot of twists and turns, cast members coming and going,  each episode named after a song title (just like the series name), and an iconic theme song that was definitely an earworm, but at the heart of it, it was about friendships that last a lifetime and it did a good job of conveying that message to the teenagers and young adults who grew up watching the show.

Why it means something to you or to our podcast: I think I've mentioned on episodes of the podcast how much I love this show.  I remember watching the school shooting episode during my freshman year of college and that was the first episode I had ever seen.  I remember thinking how powerful it was and how even though it was teaching us all a very important lesson, it was still done in a way that young people were kept interested and wanted to watch more of what happened to those characters in the aftermath of such a horrible tragedy.  I started binge watching all the seasons and eventually started watching Season 4 in real time and fell in love with the show.  Every summer I would hope that it got renewed and, by some miracle, it got renewed every year for five years.  I watched the series finale with my friend (who I call P. Sawyer.....and she calls me B. Davis) and even though I knew the show had run its course, I was still sad to see it end.

​Where can you find it now? iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix allow you to binge-watching this incredibly addictive teen drama, so make sure you check it out!

-- Kelly Lee